PornHub Bans "Deep Fakes" From Its Website

PornHub has said that pornography featuring celebrities spliced onto porn stars' bodies will be banned from the website as they are non-consensual.

From the moment the Internet was created, it was used to find pornography, and the moment it was used to find pornography, it was misused to find pornography. While porn can be a fun consensual thing for the people making it and watching it, must too often people use porn online to hurt others. Revenge porn, where people upload sexual videos and photos of exes or others without their consent, is only being dealt with now — as the story of Chrissy Chambers shows — and just now PornHub got ahead of the game by banning Deep Fakes on its website.

Deep Fakes are a result of new technology that takes every frame of a public figure's appearances and manages to put them over existing footage. This can be made for fun — such as when Nicolas Cage is placed into pre-existing movies, or when Donald Trump's face is placed over that of Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers franchise. Much more often, however, people often create pornography using the faces of celebrities. We've covered it on What's Trending before — showing how the use of technology could make a porn video starring Gal Gadot. Of course, these videos are made without the consent of the stars whose faces are used in it, thus making them non-consensual and tantamount to a nonconsensual sex act. PornHub should be lauded in getting ahead of the trend, and hopefully other websites will follow in their stead and continue to ban Deep Fakes on their website.